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Introduction

You've taken the plunge into geminispace. Welcome! Thank you for trying out this wonderful technology and community. People are the heart of any project, every person who contributes a moment of time to involve themselves with this space has my gratitude.

I am pleased to present 'The Comprehensive Guide To Geminispace'. It is the culmination of two years of experience and thoughts on the gemini protocol and its community. There is a great potential for the sharing of ideas and building of new technologies here. I hope to provide you the tools to immerse yourself and perhaps even stake your own plot in the geminispace.

Personally I use the gemini protocol every day for many of my computing needs such as weather forcasting, article reading, podcast searching, and socializing. Thanks to the hard work of developers there are now a great many interactive services on the geminispace for you to use.

Through the geminaut community I have had the pleasure of talking with intelligent and interesting people. Engaging in personal email exchanges is a novel thing in the era of instant communication that feels much more personal.

Who is this protocol for?

Everyone who has a basic interest in computing technology and alternative ways to experess their ideas online are welcome. Not just tech savy hacker types but also artist, musicians, photographers, fiction writers, cooks, climbers, programmers, off-griders, all people from all walks of life have a space here to communicate thoughts, ideas, dreams desires, and life dramas. If you have an interesting idea, story to tell, or maybe a funny thing to say, then communicate it. Here it might just be heard.

While gemini is mostly a text-based browser, users and capsule creators can still share links to pictures, audio, and files. Mature gemini browsers like lagrange can display images or play audio natively, and things like video files can still be downloaded.

Gemini for Authors

An important consideration for those that have never had their own site before is that it is easier to get started with making a capsule on gemini than it is making a website on the web.

Gemtext is far easier to learn than HTML+CSS such that a normal non-technical person can understand it in 5 minutes. A big reason why website builders are so popular is that good looking website design is complex.

Gemini relies on the browser to stylize and format the text, meaning authors only have to worry about writing text and not how its formatted so much. For those who have already learned HTML this lack of control over how the site looks and simple set of conventions can feel overly restrictive. However to people just learning how to code a website in a markdown language, this makes the learning process much easier.

There are also many services which allow you to create blogs on gemini through an interface if terminals scare you. However I truly recommend you join a public unix server and learn the very basics of navigating the terminal and creating gemtext documents and directories. Its a good excercise in learning about the underlying technologies.

Pubnixes are free to join and host a variety of services, often including free site hosting. They also are home to knowledgeable communities run by charitable system admins. If you hop on a local IRC chances are someone will help you with any questions you might have.